FlexReview (Beta)
Last updated
Last updated
Read our launch post about why we built FlexReview: https://www.aviator.co/blog/flexreview-a-flexible-code-review-framework/
An alternative to CODEOWNERS for faster code review cycles.
FlexReview introduces flexibility to your code review process by understanding the nuances of every code change and every reviewer. It find the right reviewers based on the CODEOWNERS and the context. For the context part, it analyses the history of code review patterns in your repository to calculate an expert score for every file and every developer. It uses this score along with reviewer availability, reviewer workloads, and the complexity of code changes to determine the right reviewers.
Teams are the core part of the FlexReview architecture. The code collaboration happens in teams, and ownership is also typically defined at team level.
Using FlexReview Teams, each team (or a rolled up group of teams) can define review requirements and configure automated rules. This way, we build an agreement between the author and the reviewer to optimize the code review workflow.
As the team grows, reviews can be become slow and unyielding, and occasionally turn into mere rubber-stamping. FlexReview is separating out the concepts of code ownership and review cycles to streamline the development cycle.
The codeowners feature allows you to specify individuals or teams who are responsible for certain code paths in a repository. They are automatically assigned as reviewers for any code change that modifies the respective code path.
The CODEOWNERS config works in teams where code is well structured and isolated, but it doesn’t scale well for large teams. Here’s why:
A change to an import statement and 1000 lines of feature work are treated the same
A small number of reviewers can get overwhelmed with the majority of reviews
There is no context for domain experience, all reviewers are considered alike
The CODEOWNERS file can be hard to maintain, and becomes too brittle over time
Reviewers often times only want to track changes vs. take time to properly review the PRs
Unable to set more complex requirements - for example, there’s no way to set permissions if you want reviews from both the product team and the security team
Code review assignment is also messy:
Hard to know who to assign reviewers in other teams
It won't consider out-of-office schedules / timezones of the reviewer / reviewee
It won't allow assigning primary / secondary reviewers for training purposes
It won't consider the review load of the reviewer - some people already have too many PRs to review
The key challenge with the codeowners feature is that it tries to define ownership, reviewers, and gatekeeping all in one file.
FlexReview works directly from your GitHub interface. It connects with your GitHub repository as the Aviator app and analyzes past code review patterns. Once analysis is complete, it can start suggesting reviewers, validate code approval requirements, and track SLOs. It works alongside an existing CODEOWNERS file, but you can remove fine-grained code review responsibilities in favor of more high level ownership.
FlexReview has four major components:
When a pull request is created or marked ready for review, FlexReview automatically suggests or assigns the reviewers and offers a detailed breakdown on why these reviewers were suggested. It also offers some alternate reviewers.
FlexReview reduces required reviewers for low-risk changes and allows for broader participation in code review knowledge sharing. It relaxes the reviewer requirement for PRs that have minor changes and when the authors themselves possess extensive code knowledge.
Establish a Service Level Objective (SLO) for code reviews across your organization or at a team level. Track SLOs based on code complexity, business hours, and holidays to optimize your code review feedback cycles. Set separate SLO targets for both inter-team and intra-team reviews while configuring automated actions based on when these targets are breached.
Inspired by Gerrit, AttentionSet helps you stay on top of your pull requests by tracking PRs awaiting your action, passing attention to others without nagging, and identifying PRs that are getting stale.
You can also view AttentionSet for teams to track what changes are currently blocking our team.
FlexReview is starting from a low-config mode to remove some of the assumptions for how code reviews are managed. As it evolves, it will naturally introduce some level of configurability and policies to service specialized scenarios. Check out our roadmap for further details.